Fitz & Follwell

Montreal, QC
Montreal’s finest cycle shop presents a unique concept that integrates cycling and the city’s charming history by offering snow excursions in the winter and food tours in the summer.

Fitz & Follwell is widely known for its guided excursions that include some of the best biking, walking, food, and winter tours in Montreal.

The shop also sells stylish city bicycles and accessories, and runs an in-house repair shop. Fitz & Follwell is a true gem for tourists and locals alike. As you walk in the door, you have an immediate sense that you are in good hands, from the family memorabilia hanging on the walls to the friendly, personal attention of the staff. For founder, Shea Mayer and his staff, cycling, food, and enjoying the great outdoors have been developed into an art form.

Even though Shea’s business flourished, he found various back-end operations were becoming tedious. After a couple of years of keeping meticulous notes and creating fancy Excel spreadsheets complete with analytic tables, graphs, and charts, Shea was open to other options.

“A good friend of mine, who is also a local merchant, introduced me to Lightspeed. At the time, we were running just the guided tour business. Lightspeed offered more features than we needed initially – that said, I was awestruck with how easy it made it for me to process payments and sync accounting records,” commented Shea.

A single-user license was the first step to incorporating Lightspeed technology into the functioning of the store. As Fitz & Follwell expanded, the company evolved into three business units: guided tours, retail shop, and workshop. To accommodate the growing business needs, Mayer simply upgraded to a 5-user Lightspeed license. Today, Fitz & Follwell’s staff are all connected through Lightspeed running on a private MacBook network with custom access levels set for each user. With unique logins, employees have quick access to the information relevant to their specific jobs; for example, they can check reminders for important follow-ups, batch-scan inventory, invoice customers, take payments, and review sales reports.

““Lightspeed offered more features than we needed initially – that said, I was awestruck with how easy it made it for me to process payments and sync accounting records.””

Notably, the team came to rely on the SROs (Service Repair Order) feature to automate the process for creating customer profiles, creating work orders, generating invoices, and recording method of payment. Now, when customers come to pick up their repaired bicycles, no time is wasted by having to back track to the workshop to get an invoice. Once the work order is complete, an invoice is automatically created and awaits payment at the cash. By further adding QuickBooks accounting software to the mix, Fitz & Follwell can use Lightspeed to its full capability.

“Lightspeed has definitely helped establish a clean workflow for the workshop. Personally, I have recently come to rely on it for the retail side of operations. As we’re coming up to our busy season, it’s nice to be able to review last year’s sales figures to get a better idea of what inventory to stock up on. I can also track margins on items that were big sellers to make sure we turn the most profit,” explained Mayer.

As a business owner, it’s great to be able to see the previous day’s sales reports broken down every morning by product/service category and payment methods. I can access these reports at home over breakfast, first thing at the office, or when I’m away on vacation. Being able to stay connected remotely is important to me,”

“Personally, I have recently come to rely on it for the retail side of operations.“

Future plans for Lightspeed are already in the works: “Soon we will add Lightspeed for iPad. If there is a line-up at the cash, I want to be able to process a payment on the sales floor or help a customer check the status of an item on order or in-transit from our warehouse (...) Let’s not forget about further expansion at some point, too. It took some work to enter products and suppliers initially, but knowing that we can replicate that data by simply adding more Lightspeed licenses, adding another warehouse or opening another store will be a breeze.”

As a true entrepreneur, Mayer continually looks for ways to improve his business and is keen on sharing advice. He explains: “Lightspeed has really invested in customer support, not only by extending support hours, but also by making an incredible amount of tutorials and videos available online. The videos are extremely helpful. I recommend that all new users reserve some time to watch the videos and learn the full capabilities of the software.”

"Lightspeed has definitely helped establish a clean workflow for the workshop."